Columbia Residents Take Trophy in MindGames Competition

Know the answer? See the end of this article.

That’s one of the questions (technically, answers) posed to residents from Columbia University, Yale University, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) during the 10th annual MindGames competition at APA’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Atlanta.

It was the team from Columbia that emerged victorious in the “Jeopardy”-like competition that pits residents from psychiatry programs across the country against each other with questions about medicine in general and psychiatry in particular. The event has become a popular attraction at APA’s Annual Meeting.

Judges for the competition were past APA President Michelle Riba, M.D.; Richard Balon, M.D., director of psychiatry residency training at Wayne State University; and Jerry Rosenbaum, M.D., psychiatrist in chief at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

MindGames is open to all psychiatry residency programs in the United States and Canada. The preliminary competition for this year’s game began in February, when teams of three residents took a 60-minute online test consisting of 150 multiple-choice questions. The questions follow the ABPN Part I content outline, covering both psychiatry and neurology, with a few difficult history-of-psychiatry questions to make it interesting. The winners were the three top-scoring teams with the fastest posted times.

Playing for Yale were Katherine Blackwell, M.D., Chad Lane, M.D., and Javier Ballester, M.D. For UTHSCSA the contestants were Elle Cleaves, M.D., Kimberly Benavente, M.D., and Michael Miller, M.D.

The correct answer is naltrexone. ■